To Be Twenty (Fernando Di Leo, 1978)

 

Near the start of Fernando Di Leo’s To Be Twenty, Lia and Tina meet on a beach and immediately bond over their shared mantra of being “young, hot and pissed off,” joining up to hitch a ride to Rome, with some petty shoplifting along the way. Based on that set-up, and on being told that they make a way to a commune where they’re expected to pay their way largely by having sex with the male residents, the film sounds like low-level exploitation, and indeed provides large dollops of ogling, gratuitous nudity, and coupling. It has other things on its mind too though, including providing a surprisingly thorough immersion into the commune’s odd ways (and it should be noted that the men, mostly all stoned, show little interest in the proposed arrangement), allowing the women space to talk about their bumpy personal histories (although it’s staged as a performance and it’s not necessarily clear how much can be taken at face value), and spending extended time on a police raid and subsequent interrogations (this is the portion of the movie that most obviously evokes the action-oriented bulk of Di Leo’s work), in the course of which Lia and Tina are summarily dismissed as “airheads” and kicked out of the city. The final act is genuinely unpleasant to watch, providing a climactic dose of potentially titillating activity while rapidly stamping out any sense of ensuing pleasure (the ending burst of jaunty music seems like a particularly cruel touch), plausibly straddling expectations of an inevitable “come-uppance” for Lia and Tina’s often caution-shedding exuberance, while painting the coldly self-righteous, violent men who deliver that fate in a properly wretched light. Although the film is on its face a major outlier in Di Leo’s oeuvre, it could also be seen as an extension of the sociological curiosity evident in a film like Caliber 9, and of his frequent sympathy for the women occupying the edges of the masculine-dominated action.

Enemies, a Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989)

 

Paul Mazursky’s filming of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story is a flavourful, intelligent pleasure, its well-balanced complexities placing it almost incalculably above most of the director’s coarse later work. In likely his best screen role, Ron Silver plays Herman, living in Coney Island in 1949, married to Yadwiga, the Gentile former servant who helped save his life during the war, while having an affair with Masha, a camp survivor separated from her husband, and then suddenly learning that Tamara, the wife everyone assumed was dead, is alive and also in New York: the situation is inherently comic and sometimes played as such, but it’s a comedy based in the Holocaust’s terrible, multi-faceted, ongoing proximity. It’s tangibly present, in the tattoos on several forearms, as visible and unremarked on as vaccination scars, in thoughts and conversations and speculations; when Herman sees Tamara after so many years, the magnitude of the secular miracle overwhelms his ability to welcome it as such, gratitude or joy overwhelmed by logistical panic. The film balances between a sense that almost all things might properly be allowable in the wake of such suffering, and the practical fact of laws and ethics and the human propensity to judge and envy and gossip remaining unchanged; Herman initially seems exultant at what he’s getting away with, the stress of keeping the balls in the air all part of the transgressive thrill, but by the end he’s hemmed in to the point almost of total erasure. The subtle ending suggests the possibility of new structures and allegiances though, with two of the women bringing up the absent Herman’s daughter together, while also indicating the persistence of old hierarchies (although the child is Yadwiga’s, she retains her old subservience to her former employer Tamara, almost seeming like a maid engaged to assist the real mother).

Passion (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2008)

 

If Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Passion - essentially a student project, remarkably – pushes its characters and situations too hard at many points, it’s perhaps only out of a surfeit of infectious earnestness and curiosity. It would be worth seeing if only for an extraordinary central sequence in which a young teacher, Kaho, leads her class in talking about a classmate who recently killed himself, taking them through a consideration of modes of violence and appropriate responses. It seems doubtful that Kaho’s reasoning and conclusions are entirely coherent either to the film’s audience or to the pupils, and yet the process succeeds in prompting one classmate to volunteer that he had bullied the dead boy, and for others to follow, an early example of Hamaguchi’s interest in shifting and synthesis. The intertwining of choice and instinct and responsibility also informs the film’s main narrative, focused on the possibly misaligned desires of Kaho’s fiancée Tomoya and of his two friends, one of whom almost certainly loves Kaho more fully and alertly than Tomoya does himself, but without her reciprocation. That’s one of the movie’s many points of confusion and absence: it’s notable that the dead boy is never seen, or even referred to before that scene, echoing against a much-referenced cat, also deceased just before the events in the film, who when alive influenced the living arrangements of several characters. Passion has a playful side, but frequently seems to teeter on the edge of greater anger and danger, or of more fully expressed emotion and sexuality in general, albeit often with a sense of throwing stuff out there just to see if it works (and then, if it doesn’t, of leaving it in the final cut regardless). Still, the film is more absorbingly provocative than many more fully-achieved works (even some of Hamaguchi’s own, possibly).

The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

 

Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man certainly lives up to its reputation for innovative design and technical elements, embodied in the early single-take scene in which Lewis’ character Herbert wanders through the seemingly empty house in which he’s just been employed as a handyman, the frame taking in the large central lobby and staircases rising therefrom, three floors of bedrooms on either side, and unseen to him, in the bottom right corner of the frame, a dining room crammed with young women, the very thing that Herbert had pledged to avoid. The movie’s main premise, that the women collaborate in keeping him busy to avoid him from leaving, strangely fails to land though, in part because Lewis, in typical style, plays Herbert in good and bad times alike as barely functional and always on the edge of becoming demented; it follow that the movie lacks any kind of sexual charge, the women barely registering as individuals (both as director and in character, Lewis seems more comfortable with the two older members of the set-up, a former opera singer who provides a home for aspiring performers, and a motherly housekeeper). The film amply illustrates the bizarre duality of Lewis’ creative sensibility: on the one hand engaging with relish with the then novel notion of live TV broadcasts and the attendant chaos, and luxuriating in spatial possibilities (extended further by the fact of one door which appears to open onto a world of pure imagination); on the other hand aggressively assaulting the viewer with his unbound narcissism and excruciating mugging. The aggregate effect is as troubling as it is funny, which of course amounts to a recommendation, supplemented by an all-time-great opening title sequence, and a weirdly affecting cameo by comedian Buddy Lester, his tough-guy character reduced to blubbering mush within minutes of encountering Herbert, in its way the movie’s most pointed illustration of the near-extortionate subtext to Lewis’ antics.